WANDA
Genosha was beautiful even in the dead of winter. The metal palace glittered with frost, the buildings all strung with white lights like shining snowflakes. The sea beating itself against the cliffs was almost black, and it was so cold that the water froze in jagged crystals on the rocks, breaking like glass every time a wave crashed in.
Wanda loved this island, her home, but after a few weeks back she found that she still wasn't happy.
Her father still didn't have time for her, though he did find mutant tutors to help her train her powers. Pietro hardly spent any time at the palace, shirking his training to get into all sorts of trouble, even sometimes running all the way to the mainland. Lorna mooned over her friends at the institute, and they all suffered from the usual teenage mood swings.
Some of them more than others.
Wanda and Lorna were training in a big courtyard surrounded by the rose gardens one day when Pietro appeared suddenly out of nowhere and Wanda blew up at him.
"And where have you been?" she practically shouted. "Hanging out with your deadbeat friends? Getting girls pregnant?"
"Saving kittens, actually," he said, unbothered by her angry outburst. "There were three of them in a tree, a white one and a black one andoneofthepatchycoloredones-"
"I don't care if you were saving kittens! You were supposed to be here! Training! Like the rest of us!"
"Woah, Wanda, you need to lighten up."
"And you need to be more responsible! You're seventeen!"
Pietro rolled his eyes and raced around the courtyard, putting flower crowns from the gardens that grew on Genosha even in winter on both of his sister's heads. Wanda's looked comical with her angry scowl.
"You're too uptight," said Pietro. "You need to get out more, have some fun. All you ever do is train and study and read books."
"That's because I take my responsibilities seriously, unlike some people."
KURT
The year progressed as it usually did, with Thanksgiving at the mansion and some of the students with places to go leaving for the December holidays. Kurt stayed at the institute, enjoying the relative quiet, though Domino and Toad and his other tormentors were some of the few that stayed-at least they hadn't bothered him as much since the incident with Wanda. And he hadn't frozen up again like he had that day, so he could stick up for himself just fine.
Of course he thought about Wanda. He could see their oak tree from his bedroom window and would sometimes find himself gazing out towards it. He wondered what it would have been like if she'd stayed.
After the holidays he had to endure the post-holiday chatter; Bobby's parents had tried to get him to enroll in a "regular" school; Kitty's parent's had gotten a cat ("Can you believe they replaced me with an actual kitty? The nerve!"); Warren's holiday with his father had been as fraught as always. It seemed that everyone had some complaint about their family, but Kurt couldn't help but feel a little jealous, because at least they had a family. His Christmas had been Logan drinking by the fire and new socks from the Professor.
There were a few days between when everyone got back and when classes officially started again, so the students found ways to entertain themselves, like one sparkling afternoon when Kitty decided it would be fun to have a school-wide snowball fight.
Which turned out to be insanity.
"Kurt, you're on my team," said Kitty, when he found himself barricaded behind an igloo on the back lawn. She was bundled up in a puffy pink parka and earmuffs, but the look on her face was fiercely focused. "Together we'll have an advantage. I can draw the other teams' fire while you teleport in and wallop them."
"I think Bobby has the real advantage," replied Kurt, ducking down to avoid one of Bobby's massive snowballs, which he generated himself. He could throw faster than anyone except Logan, who'd been dragged into the game when Scott chucked a snowball at his head.
"You'll just have to watch out for Angel," said Kitty, already readying herself to phase through the igloo. "He attacks from above."
"Wunderbar."
And then the plan was in motion. Kitty phased through the igloo and popped out the other side, a torrent of snowballs going straight through her as she hurled insults at Jean, Bobby, and Scott, who were hiding behind a gardening shed.
"You throw like a snowman!" she yelled, as Kurt formed two nicely rounded snowballs and teleported onto the roof of the shed.
"What is that supposed to mean?" Bobby yelled back, a moment before a snowball hit him in the back of the head. "Ow! Hey! Watch out-"
But he didn't warn them fast enough, and as Scott looked up he got a snowball to the face. "Eurgh! Kurt! You're going to pay for that-"
Kurt grinned. "Nein, I am not, because you two are both out."
"I'm not out yet," said Jean with a grin, telekinetically levitating three snowballs and shooting them at Kurt, who just managed to 'port away in time.
"Katzchen!" he yelled, 'porting from tree to tree as Jean's snowballs chased him. "What's your plan now?"
"I thought you would get them all!"
"Vell, I didn't!" he tried to gather enough snow for a snowball but just as he was reaching for it Rogue and Piotr barreled out of the trees, both shrieking like their clothes were on fire (which they were not) the reason for this was evident as Logan flew out of the trees in what looked to Kurt like a berserker rage, shouting "I don't care about your damned rules, you can't take me down with a few snowballs!"
Kurt was so distracted that he missed the shadow swooping down over him, and only noticed in time to think oh dang before two massive snowballs hit him from behind, knocking him out of the tree and into the powdery drifts of snow on the ground. For a moment he lay on his back staring up at the pristine blue sky.
"Sorry Kurt," said Warren, alighting on the ground nearby, "are you alright? I didn't mean to hit you so hard."
"I think something might be broken," said Kurt, groaning and clutching his arm.
Warren dropped to his knees beside him with concern written across his handsome face, just in time to get a tailful of snow flicked at him.
Kurt grinned. "Had you fooled."
"Hey!" Warren brushed snow out of his hair. "You can't do that! You're out!"
"I don't think the rules count for much anymore."
The teams broke up into a free-for-all, mostly students hurling snow at Logan and the other instructors (except Storm, who was a terrifying force during a snowball fight) and which ended with everyone lying on the ground laughing and making snow angels.
WANDA
Wanda was determined to make her father pay attention to her. She trained constantly, spent long hours into the night teaching herself new languages, and even taught herself sign-language from a book in her father's extensive library, and began working on adapting it to mutants with differently configured hands.
She liked to keep herself busy but Pietro had been right; she didn't get out enough. In fact, she didn't have any friends at all. It hadn't bothered her before she went to the institute and saw up close what it was like to have a life outside of her duties and family.
She wondered if she would have been happier if she'd stayed.
At least all of her training paid off; she was more powerful than ever, if a little temperamental. Her powers seemed to grow at a rate she couldn't keep up with, and they seemed to be fueled by her raging teenage hormones. In other words, they were quickly going out of control.
"You're holding on too tightly," her father said on one of the rare occasions he attended her training sessions. "Imagine that your powers are an eggshell; if you hold it too loosely it falls and breaks, but too tightly and it fractures. You need to find a balance."
"There is no balance," said Wanda, gritting her teeth as she tried to hit a target with a hex bolt without obliterating it. She failed. Nothing was worse than failure. "I can't control them."
She didn't mean to bring down the orphanage.
Really, it was just part of the orphanage, and luckily no one got hurt...no one but Wanda.
It began in the morning, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new orphanage on Genosha. At the island nation's genesis her father had tried to place every mutant orphan on Genosha with a loving family or guardian, but as more mutants flooded in from all over the world, the number of orphaned mutant children grew significantly. Thus, the orphanage. A place not unlike Xavier's own school for gifted youngsters.
Wanda stood on the front steps with her father, prim and proper in full regalia, looking out over the eager crowd. The children were all seated at the very front, and most of them had visible mutations (not all of their parent's were dead: many were abandoned). It broke her heart to see so many children without a family or parents to love them. She had something that most mutants didn't; even when Pietro annoyed her, even when her father was too busy to even speak to her, she knew people cared about her.
Her volatile powers reacted to the strong emotion but she tamped them down. The ceremony was only an hour long and then she could find somewhere to blow off a little steam.
But after the ribbon was cut there was a broadcast tour of the orphanage, and then a luncheon with the children, and meanwhile Wanda's untamed powers built up inside her. It wasn't that she didn't want to be there. She did. She just wanted so much more than this, so much more for mutants. It wasn't enough that there was a place for these orphans-so many orphans-so many abandoned. They were refugees and some of them couldn't even speak yet.
That was too large of a feeling to tamp down.
Halfway through the luncheon her soup spoon began glowing scarlet in her hand, clattering against the edge of her bowl as Magneto, seated to her left, waxed poetic about the long-term benefits of the orphanage.
"Excuse me," said Wanda, dropping her spoon with a splash and pushing her chair back. Her father didn't even notice as she fled the dining hall.
Everyone was at the luncheon so the rest of the orphanage was empty, its recently furnished rooms still smelling faintly of sawdust and paint. There was a garden out back (she'd seen it during the tour) and that's what she aimed to find. A place to calm herself, or at least somewhere she could use her powers without risking children or upholstery.
She was halfway there when a small voice stopped her.
"Ex...exuse me?"
Wanda turned to find a little girl, maybe four years old, with bright orange skin and fins on either side of her face. "What is it, sweetie?"
The little girl blinked big, damp green eyes. "I don' know where I am."
"You're lost?" Wanda swallowed. Her feelings and her powers were ready to boil over, and this wasn't helping. But she crossed the room and offered her hand to the little girl. "I'll help you find your way back to the others, alright? This place is awfully big, isn't it?"
"Back to da?"
"Yes, back to da." Wanda wasn't really listening. She was focusing on keeping her powers under control, putting one foot in front of the other.
The little girl had a small, tremulous voice. "I don' wanna go back where da is. It was'n nice there. The ones what look like you weren't nice. Da say's 'no hit! is mean!' but the ones what look like you din' know, so I tell dem 'no hit! no hit da!' but they din' stop, and da cried, and got all red, and I don' wanna go back..."
It finally sank in. This was an orphanage. This little girl had watched her father die at the hands of humans.
Wanda's heart beat faster. Her powers roared. So close to breaking.
She wasn't going to make it to the dining hall. She couldn't go to the gardens now.
"Hey," she said, pointing the little girl through the main room to where the lights and chatter of the luncheon were just visible. "Do you like cookies? If you go that way nice people will give you cookies, okay? But you have to go by yourself, like a big girl. Can you do that?"
The little girl nodded.
"I'm so, so sorry," said Wanda, and then she ran.
What seemed like an eternity later Magneto found her amid the rubble of the kitchen, her knees drawn up to her chest, everything around her warped and ruined. She lifted her face to her father, tears streaming down her cheeks. She hadn't been able to control herself, and now she'd disappointed her father again.
She could have killed that little girl.
She could have killed everyone.
"Is everyone okay?" She sniffled. Pathetic. "There was a little girl, with fins...?"
"Everyone is fine. Shaken up, but, well...you did shake things up a bit."
"It's not fair," she said, and she wasn't only talking about her unruly powers. "I just want to be in control. I just want it to stop."
"It's alright, my dear..." He knelt before her and gently turned her chin so she could look into his face. "I'm going to help you. We are going to stop this."
KURT
The day after the snowball fight was the Sunday before classes and training started again and Kurt made the most of it, going to the mall with Kitty, Bobby, and Rogue (Scott and Jean weren't invited because they were being insufferably in love). They went to the movies and got milkshakes, and even hit up the arcade for a couple of hours.
When they returned to the mansion everyone went inside to try out their new makeup (well, Kitty and Rogue were, but they'd invited the boys too) but Kurt caught sight of someone on the tennis court. Someone he hadn't seen in over a month.
"Lorna!" he ran across the lawn, the brisk wind tugging at his coat and hair. "I didn't know you were here. Is it just-I mean-did-"
Lorna shook her head, knowing exactly what he was trying to get at. "It's just Pietro and I."
"Oh." His face fell. "Is Vonda alright?"
A flicker of unease crossed Lorna's pretty, delicate face. "She'll be okay. I have to go, sorry."
She hurried away towards a group of her friends, leaving Kurt to wonder what exactly she'd meant. She'll be okay. Did that mean Wanda wasn't okay now? Was she sick?
He didn't know but he intended to find out.
Hm. That was dramatic. Can you believe that this chapter started out as fluff?